Black, red and white chalk on buff paper, roughy 7 x 10 inches (19 x 25 cm); in the collection of the Morgan Library and Museum. Use the Zoom feature or download link.

Watteau was noted for his “trois crayon” drawings, in which black, red and white chalks are used on toned paper, usually buff or cream, to great effect in quickly rendering figures or faces.

Here, he has succinctly captured the likeness of his subject with gestural lines, a bit of hatching for shading and some quickly noted white highlights. For all of their simplicity, the drawings have a remarkable presence.

I haven’t yet seen the new Luc Besson film, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, but I have read a number of the French comics (bandes dessinées) on which the movie was based — Valérian and Laureline (alternately, Valerian: Spatio-Temporal Agent), created by writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières.

Mézières is an influential and highly respected French comics artist, though not well known here in the U.S. except among fans of Franco-Belgian comics.

He has worked on a number of comics and illustration projects over the course of his career, but is best known for his work on Valérian and Laureline, and as a concept designer for films like Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (including the designs that inspired the flying taxis).

Valérian and Laureline is a long running science fiction comics series that was originally serialized in the French comics magazine Pilote. It has been tremendously influential on both comics and film.

It’s widely recognized to have been a distinct but uncredited influence on George Lucas in his designs and settings for the original Star Wars trilogy. There is an article on Core 77 that points out some of the parallels between scenes from the movies and prior comic panels from Valérian and Laureline. There is another article pointing out what Star Wars took from Valérian and Laureline on Popular Mechanics.

Mézières’s style is more light and cartoony than the styles usually associated with American super-hero and adventure comics, but it gives the stories and the characters a jaunty, breezy character, and works well with Mézières’s wildly imaginative settings.

The French Valérian and Laureline comics albums have been translated into English, and most recently are being collected into a series of volumes with three of the original French albums (what might be called “graphic novels” here) in each volume. There are three collected volumes available as of this writing.

If you try a Google image search for “Valerian”, it will mostly come up with promo pictures for the movie; try searching for “Valerian comics”, “Valerian and Laureline”, “Valerian et Laureline” or ‘Jean-Claude Mézières”.

Watercolor and gouache; roughly 10 x 15 inches (25 x 38 cm); in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Use the “Download” or “Enlarge” links under the image on their site.

British-American artist John William Hill was noted for his scientific illustrations of birds and other animals, as well as his landscape and still life subjects.

I like the way his rhythmic strokes of color give his depictions of foliage both texture and a sense of movement. He’s also given the rocks a surprising degree of solidity and texture considering their economical notation.

There appears to be a small animal to the left of the figures (images above, third down), but I’m uncertain what it is.

Atey Ghailan is a concept artist and illustrator living in Lidingö, Sewden and currently working with Riot Games.

The examples of work on his various web presences (also under the handle snatti/snatti89 ) are mostly of personal work, and primarily from a project called “Path of Miranda” which is the story of a young girl and her companions, a corgi and a penguin, investigating the disappearance of some robots.

His images for that project, along with some of his other images, have a pleasing visual character somewhere between digital plein air and Miyazaki-style anime backgrounds. I particularly enjoy his use of dappled sunlight in wooded scenes and patterns of light and shadow in interiors and street scenes.

In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. Use the “Download” or “Enlarge” links under the image on their site.

“Painterly” may be too mild a word for the wonderful assortment of scrapings, scumbling, smearing and loaded brush dabbing and scrubbing that make this smoky 1909 cityscape by American painter Colin Campbell Cooper such a visual treat.